The betrayal of (and by) American institutions. (What else is new?) Thanks for the phrase, George Packer: important concept. Quoting the above-linked wikipedia item:

… follows the decline of a number of American institutions that Packer believes underpinned this contract, including locally-owned businesses, unions, and public schools. According to Packer, the “void” left by the decline of these institutions “was filled by the default force in American life, organized money”.

Apropos, Thus saith pk:

Organization is a positive for survival, up to a point. I believe that humans passed that point a long time ago, now we are awash in the infinite toxicities of over-organization. Too much organization is no better for life or for human society than too little organization.

My anarchism isn’t against organization; it’s against over-organization.
I’m not against money; I’m against (over-)organized money.

This morning I blended my breakfast smoothie. I put the almond milk into the blender, added an egg, had no banana but used a few peach halves, threw in three buds from a somewhat grungy hand of ginger … added a bit else, a handful of ice, and pushed the button for one of the high speeds. Stopping and restarting I can hear the ice cubes gravitate back toward the blades as they reduce to frothy slush. I poured the first glass. Ah, perfect. Then the ginger after-taste kicks in, wakes me up better than my black coffee. Bliss.

Except for something I hadn’t heard slap-shoot off the blades: here (and again there) were resistant clumps of ginger fiber; kind of a veggie gall, where root buds broke and scabbed over. I hadn’t heard them ricochet the way I heard the pulverizing ice. Now the other day I got a sliver of ginger that lucked its way past the blades. Ooo, what a kick. Zowie, right on my palette. But this one was different, inferior. And I knew why (or should have known why) in advance. I bought a few clusters of ginger at SaveALot the other day though I could see that they weren’t the freshest. I thus skipped a trip to WalMart where the ginger is generally perfect. That’s part of my reward for being broke and on food stamps: the sabotaged intellectual, the straight-jacketed reformer. I yank off the grungy buds and throw them away as I use them, Calvinist me, unwilling to waste anything, unable to afford to waste anything, figuring I can throw away half of the reduced price ginger and still save part of my welfare pittance. Still, this morning a couple of the remaining knobs which I used apparently still had a desiccated knot or two. And now I had an unlovely ginger stub in my mouth. Still, fiber — maybe good roughage, not likely to be corrupt — but I spit it out.

I spit it out the way our over-organized organized money society spit me out!

The schools can tell by the first grade, if not by kindergarden, which nascent consumers blend well, reduce readily to low-friction liquid, and which need a heavier axe. I’m as proud of having been rejected from the classroom, sent to the principal’s office, singled out for special treatments … as I am of my informed reading of Shakespeare’s sonnets, my intended PhD thesis that not one academic that I’m aware of has yet listened to or read properly: understood. (See Hierarchy vs. Conviviality Stories.)

Of course in our society it’s the wasted saint, genius, god, savior, reformer who was potentially nourishing. It’s the Temple which is desiccated, tough, fibrous: diseased: a betrayal of its charter. Our penny-in-the-fuse-box trust-to-luck misrepresentational society has learned a lot since Jesus’ Temple of Solomon.

What kills me is how the school, the market, does hear and understand what I say, understand it just enough to fear it, know that it must be interrupted, pulverized, punished. My take on Ivan Illich’s proposal of learning networks, an unsupervised free market, my prototype internet, was crushed by the society, and when I complained, I was arrested: unpublished-me, then additionally jailed and censored … But first: co-opted! Nearly everything today plagiarizes Illich’s and my work! Nothing more conspicuously that this internet!

Ja. Freedom ist verbotten.

Nevertheless, I, and I alone, offered the world’s first cybernetic bulletin board. 1970. Digitize data, offer affordable data bases in place of inflated coercion. (Though I’d been fantasizing internets, modemed-data coordinations, in my fiction writing since the later 1960s.

Dating services? That’s a plagiarism: knock down, sabotage the public data base, divert resources away from the inventors, don’t acknowledge the source of the theft. Amazon, EBay, Google, Yahoo … Facebook … all plagiarisms. (Unconscious though: I don’t believe people could be such thieves if they saw what they were doing.)

That’s a prime function of organized money: keep the consumers blind to the choices they were maneuvered away from. Of course once Scotsmen see what Macbeth has done they too must lie about it: how many can be truthful and also live with themselves?

Academics, Shakespeare’s Sonnets

I’m not aware of any academics having a clue what I meant by cybernetic metaoxymoron in Shakespeare’s sonnets, in or out of universities. I’m not aware of any such amateur readers either. But the amateurs aren’t supposed to understand anything; the academics are!

If I had to bet who might understand a degree better I’d pick the man in the street and bet against the academic, the supposed expert.

For more than a decade I’ve been publishing Shakespeare’s sonnets online, but even before all my domains were knocked down by ripples from the fed censoring my testimony against my university, I hadn’t gotten far with the readings of the individual sonnets. (See on Shakespeare’s Sonnets Menu. [No, 2015 10 11 It’s some time since I unlinked what I’d done. I take it back: I don’t want my torturers to be blessed by my medicine.]) But I long ago finished the general statements. Any automaton half-trying should be able to fill in the illustrating details: at least enough to get an essential or two of the overview. You shouldn’t have to hear the Eroica Symphony behind the first few measures to know that it’s good.

Caveman Smoothie

The Smoothie was an aspect of my son’s recent visit that was the best Christmas present of all, rubbing up against his paleolithic diet. My darling Jan gave me the blender a few days after Christmas, now she’s drinking modified caveman smoothies too!

Sunday morning I made my first cashew milk. Just great! I now have almonds to make my own almond milk too, still have a few cans of coconut milk. All things dairy are banished, at east in this context.

This morning’s smoothie had a few extras, including non-caveman extras: I mixed the nut milk, the egg, the peaches in lieu of banana, the ginger, several ice cubes: and improvised with a handful of blueberries, a handful of mixed cereals (including muesli! with its own nuts and dried fruits) …

I drank the first glass, did my calisthenics, 40 crunches so far today, drank a second … did my email, scanned some headlines, read a few tennis items, and freshened the remaining smoothie with another ice cube and a handful of frozen mixed-berries. Man oh man. By that time the smoothie was becoming lunch: then, late lunch.

My first taste of such a smoothie came by sharing bk’s. Weird, took a minute to get used to it. My own first smoothie hit me with the ginger as an aftertaste. Ooh, ohh. My first little marble of not quite liquified ginger electrified me: wonderful! (It gave me an ecstatic memory of a julienne of sautéed ginger in a perfect dish from the Say Eng Lok restaurant on East Broadway, NY’s greatest restaurant, at least in the 1970s. I don’t miss much about New York these days but that’s one thing I do. But of course were I there today, with spending money (ha ha), I wouldn’t have a clue where to go, what to try first. Great restaurants become merely good, a greasy spoon may translate into heaven on earth.)

PS A few hours later, up to sixty in my crunches, planning more, I concoct a desert smoothie to solve a different skinflint problem. A year or two ago I bought a jar of hazelnut spread: didn’t know what to expect, didn’t expect much. What I got was something familiar but from long ago: the 1940s: when peanut butter had to be stirred, hard. In the pantry it was concrete with oil floating on top. Now it’s all homogenized, even the supposedly “natural” peanut butters. I used to jackhammer at the peanut butter: that was part of life, but it isn’t part of the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s … Maybe I still pried away at peanut butter in the early 1950s. But we, even I, get lazy: spoiled rotten. So it occurs to me: break up the hazel concrete and oil just enough to shove half the remains into the blender with some cashew milk and some vanilla ice-cream: maybe add a few bing cherries.

Wow zowie. I’ll soon be rid of the hazelnut spread: but won’t hesitate to buy more!

Jan, my darling, that blender is one of the best presents I’ve ever received.

Money doesn’t stand for anything,
and money now grows faster than the real world.